Before publishing or printing a document, users must identify and verify that text in the document is correctly formatted. Using conventional techniques, identification and verification of text formatting require substantial user effort and time. A standard, letter-sized page can easily have hundreds of words and thousands of characters. A multiple-page newspaper, publication, or book can have tens of thousands of words and hundreds of thousands of characters. To verify text formatting on a multi-page newspaper, a newspaper publisher typically needs to employ multiple people (e.g., copy editors, writers, and the like) to review the text of a newspaper, character by character.
Using conventional copy-editing techniques, including manual reviewing, does not ensure that text formatting is completely identified and correctly applied. Conventional techniques used to identify text formatting are time consuming and inaccurate. For example, a user must scrutinize text checking individual words, or even individual characters with the user's own eyes. Typical text formatting verification tasks include manual checking to ensure text in some portions of a document are set or formatted to one font, in a certain font size (e.g., Arial font, size 10), manual checking to ensure text in other portions of a document are formatted to another font, in a certain font size (e.g., Arial font, size 8), manual checking to ensure headlines are formatted with a desired style (e.g., bold, size 14), or manual checking to ensure foreign language words are italicized. Regardless of the types of formatting verification, conventional applications typically require manual and labor-intensive checking, which does not ensure that text formatting is identified and correctly applied.
Other problems associated with conventional techniques involve the existence of numerous fonts, font sizes, and font styles and their numerous formatting differences. Some formatting differences are subtle and difficult to detect. For example, the difference between a 6-point, italic footnote number and a 6-point, non-italic footnote number is very subtle and difficult to detect. Likewise, there is often difficulty locating a character, word, or sentence that is formatted differently than surrounding text. For example, text set to a different font (e.g., Verdana) or a different font size (e.g., 9 point) on a tabloid-sized page of 10-point, Arial text is difficult to detect. These subtle differences often go unnoticed in an editing process or remain undiscovered until after a document has been printed, at which time correcting such errors can be impossible or expensive.
Thus, a solution for identifying text formatting without the limitations of conventional techniques is needed.